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  3. Studies in Modern British Religious History

This series aims to differentiate `religious history' from the narrow confines of church history, investigating not only the social and cultural history of religion, but also theological, political and institutional themes, while remaining sensitive to the wider historical context; it thus advances an understanding of the importance of religion for the history of modern Britain, with volumes covering all periods of British history since the Reformation.

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32 results in Studies in Modern British Religious History

Page 1 of 2

The Crisis of Calvinism in Revolutionary England, 1640-1660
  • Arminian Theologies of Predestination and Grace
  • Andrew Ollerton
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    12 January 2024
    Print publication:
    16 May 2023
  • This book investigates a puzzling and neglected phenomenon - the rise of English Arminianism during the decade of puritan rule.

The Sunday School Movement in Britain, 1900-1939
  • Caitriona McCartney
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    11 January 2024
    Print publication:
    25 April 2023
  • Demonstrates the vital role Sunday schools played in forming and sustaining faith before, during, and after the First World War for British populations both at home and abroad.

British Christianity and the Second World War
  • Edited by Michael Snape, Stuart Bell
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    21 June 2023
    Print publication:
    21 February 2023
  • Examines the role of Christianity in British statecraft, politics, media, the armed forces and in the education and socialization of the young during the Second World War.

Britain and the German Churches, 1945–1950
  • The Role of the Religious Affairs Branch in the British Zone
  • Peter Howson
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    24 March 2021
    Print publication:
    18 June 2021
  • Explores the ways in which the British Religious Affairs Branch aimed to organise religious life in post-war Germany.

Rational Dissenters in Late Eighteenth-Century England
  • 'An ardent desire of truth'
  • Valerie Smith
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    09 February 2021
    Print publication:
    18 June 2021
  • Rational Dissent was a branch of Protestant religious nonconformity which emerged to prominence in England between c. 1770 and c. 1800. While small, the movement provoked fierce opposition from both Anglicans and Orthodox Dissenters.

The Church of England and British Politics since 1900

Protestant Dissent and Philanthropy in Britain, 1660–1914

Civil Religion and the Enlightenment in England, 1707–1800
  • Ashley Walsh
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    27 March 2021
    Print publication:
    20 March 2020
  • This innovative book reveals how Enlightened writers in England, both lay and clerical, proclaimed public support for Christianity by transforming it into a civil religion, despite the famous claim of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that Christians professed an uncivil faith.

Mysticism in Early Modern England
  • Liam Peter Temple
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    02 June 2021
    Print publication:
    19 April 2019
  • Mysticism in Early Modern England traces how mysticism featured in polemical and religious discourse in seventeenth-century England and explores how it came to be viewed as a source of sectarianism, radicalism, and, most significantly, religious enthusiasm.

Protestant Pluralism
  • The Reception of the Toleration Act, 1689–1720
  • Volume 37
  • Ralph Stevens
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 June 2019
    Print publication:
    21 September 2018
  • The 1689 Toleration Act marked a profound shift in the English religious landscape. By permitting the public worship of Protestant Dissenters (largely Presbyterian), the statute laid the foundations for legal religious pluralism, albeit limited, and ensured that eighteenth-century English society would be multi-denominational.

The Education of the Anglican Clergy, 1780–1839
  • Sara Slinn
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    30 August 2017
    Print publication:
    30 August 2017
  • This study of recruitment to the ministry of the Church of England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries overturns many long-standing assumptions about the education and backgrounds of the clergy in late Hanoverian England and Wales. It offers insights into the nature and development of the profession generally and into the role that individual bishops played in shaping the staffing of their dioceses. In its exploration of how it was possible for boys of relatively humble social origins to be promoted into the pulpits of the established Church, it throws light on mechanisms of social mobility and shows how aspirant clergy went about fashioning a credible social and professional identity.By examining how would be clergymen were educated and professionally formed, the book shows that, alongside the well-known route through the universities, there was an alternative route via specialist grammar schools. Prospective ordinands might also seek out clerical tutors to help them to study for the academic parts of ordination exams and to prepare for the spiritual and pastoral aspects of their role. These alternative methods of ordination preparation were sometimes under the cognizance of bishops, and occasionally under their control, but they were generally authored by parish clergy and were small-scale, self-supporting, bottom-up solutions to the needs of upcoming generations of clergy. This book has much to interest historians of religion, culture, class and education, and illustrates how in-depth prosopographical study can offer fresh perspectives.SARA SLINN is Research Fellow at the School of History & Heritage, University of Lincoln.

'This Great Firebrand': William Laud and Scotland, 1617-1645
  • Leonie James
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    15 February 2018
    Print publication:
    31 May 2017
  • William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury (1633-45), remains one of the most controversial figures in British ecclesiastical and political history. His rise to prominence under Charles I, his contribution to the shaping and implementation of contentious religious policies and his subsequent and catastrophic downfall are fundamental to our understanding of the religious and political developments which led to the collapse of royal authority in all three of the Stuart kingdoms. Events in Scotland were central to this chain of events, and this book presents Scotland as a case study for a fresh interpretation of Laud, his career and his working partnership with Charles I. Casting new and much-needed light on Laud's engagement in Scottish affairs, this book reveals that his agency in Scotland was broadly consistent with - although differing in detail from - his approach in England and Ireland. It represents a major contribution to key debates on the nature of religion and politics in the 1630s and early 1640s and enhances current thinking on the role of both prince and prelate in the formulation of ecclesiastical policy, the 'British problem', and, indeed, the causes of the British Civil Wars. LEONIE JAMES is Lecturer in History at the University of Kent, Canterbury.

Catholicism, Identity and Politics in the Age of Enlightenment
  • The Life and Career of Sir Thomas Gascoigne, 1745-1810
  • Alexander Lock
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    31 March 2017
    Print publication:
    15 September 2016
  • This book explores the changing aspirations, attitudes and identities of English Catholics in the late eighteenth century, a period which marked a critical moment of transition in their spiritual, political and intellectual culture. It is based on the experiences of the English Catholic baronet, Grand Tourist and politician Sir Thomas Gascoigne (1745-1810). Gascoigne was born on the Continent intoa devout Catholic family based in Yorkshire; however, following an unusual Continental upbringing and extensive series of Grand Tours to the courts of Catholic Europe, he would abjure his faith for aseat in Parliament. Throughout his life, he was an important advocate of agricultural reform, a considerable coal owner interested in mining engineering, as well as a keen developer of spa culture. By examining the experiences of Gascoigne and his milieu, this book explores English Catholic attitudes towards continental Catholicism, the influence of the European Enlightenment upon their educationand outlook, and how this affected their Christianity, their estates and their conception of national identity. It demonstrates how increased toleration entailed a gradual rejection amongst English Catholics of a pious separatism for a more ecumenical and, ultimately, Enlightened approach to religion. Although this risked the loss of English Catholics to Anglicanism, many - like Gascoigne - remained crypto-Catholic in sympathy. They adapted their faith to the Enlightenment and regarded it as a matter of personal conviction and private choice.

    ALEXANDER LOCK is Curator of Modern Historical Manuscripts at the British Library.

The Origins of Primitive Methodism
  • Sandy Calder
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    29 May 2021
    Print publication:
    17 March 2016
  • This book shows that while the Primitive Methodist Connexion's mature social character was working-class, this did not reflect its social origins. It was never the church of the working class, the great majority of whose churchgoers went elsewhere: rather it was the church whose commitment to its emotional witness was increasingly incompatible with middle-class pretensions. Sandy Calder shows thatthe Primitive Methodist Connexion was a religious movement led by a fairly prosperous elite of middle-class preachers and lay officials appealing to a respectable working-class constituency. This reality has been obscured by the movement's self-image as a persecuted community of humble Christians, an image crafted by Hugh Bourne, and accepted by later historians, whether Methodists with a denominational agenda to promote or scholars in search of working-class radicals. Primitive Methodists exaggerated their hardships and deliberately under-played their social status and financial success. Primitive Methodism in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became the victim of its own founding mythology, because the legend of a community of persecuted outcasts, concealing its actualrespectability, deterred potential recruits.

    SANDY CALDER graduated with a PhD in Religious Studies from the Open University and has previously worked in the private sector.

Scandal and Religious Identity in Early Stuart England
  • A Northamptonshire Maid's Tragedy
  • Peter Lake, Isaac Stephens
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    11 June 2021
    Print publication:
    21 May 2015
  • This book starts with an extraordinary event and document. The event is the trial and execution for infanticide of a puritan minister, John Barker, along with his wife's niece and their maid, in Northampton in 1637; the document, what appears to be a virtual transcript of Barker's last speech on the gallows. His downfall soon became polemical fodder in scribal publications, with Puritans circulating defences of Barker and anti-Calvinists producing a Laudian condemnation of the minister.

    Scandal and Religious Identity in Early Stuart England uses Barker's crime and fate as a window on the religious world of early modern England. It is based upon an extraordinary deposit of manuscript and printed sources, all produced between 1637 and 1640 by people living in close proximityto one another and all of whom knew one another, either as friends or more often as enemies. Marshalling evidence from public polemical sources and from almost entirely private ones - a diary, private letters and a spiritual autobiography - the book is able to examine the same events and persons, and beliefs and practices, from multiple perspectives: the micro and the macro, the personal and thepolitical, and the affective and the doctrinal. Throughout, we meet a range of very different people putting various bodies of religious theory into practice, connecting the most local and particularof events and rivalries to the great issues of the day and responding, in certain cases, to the promptings of the Holy Spirit and the temptations of the devil.
    This approach enables a whole series of generalisations to be explored: about the relation between politics and religion, devotion and polemic, puritans and their enemies, local and national affairs; between rumour, manuscript and print; and, finally, about gender hierarchy and the social roles of men and women. The result is an extraordinarily detailed and intimate portrait of the religio-political scene in an English county on the eve of civil war.

    PETER LAKE is Distinguished University Professor of early modern English history at Vanderbilt. He is the author of several studies of English religion, culture and politics in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods.

    ISAAC STEPHENS is Assistant Professor of History at Saginaw Valley State University and has published on early modern marriage, religion, and life-writing.

Evangelicalism and the Church of England in the Twentieth Century

Preaching in Eighteenth-Century London
  • Jennifer Farooq
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 March 2014
    Print publication:
    21 November 2013
  • This book looks at the role of preaching culture in eighteenth-century England. Beyond the confines of churches, preaching was heard at political anniversaries and elections, thanksgiving and fast days, and society and charity meetings, all of which were major occasions on the English political and social calendars. Dozens of sermons were published each year, and the popularity of sermons, both from the pulpit and in print, make them crucial for understanding the role of religion in eighteenth-century society. To provide a broad perspective on preaching culture, this book focuses on print and manuscript evidence for preaching in London. London had a unique combination of preaching venues and audiences, including St. Paul's cathedral, parliament, the royal court, the corporation of London, London-based societies, and numerous parish churches and Dissenting meetinghouses. The capital had the greatest range of preaching anywhere in England. However, many of the developments in London reflected trends in preaching culture across the country. This was a period when English society experienced significant social, religious and political changes, and preachers' roles evolved in response to these changes. Early in the century, preachers were heavily engaged in partisan politics. However, as these party heats waned, they increasingly became involved with societies and charities that were part of the blossoming English urban culture. The book also explores the impact of sermons on society by looking at contemporary perceptions of preaching, trends in the publication of sermons, the process of the publication and the distribution of sermons, and the reception of sermons. It demonstrates how preachers of various denominations adapted to an increasingly literate and print-centred culture and the continuing vitality of oral preaching culture. The book will be of interest not only to scholars of religion and sermon literature, but also to those interested in eighteenth-century politics, urban society, oral and print cultures, and publishing. JENNIFER FAROOQ is an independent scholar.

Religion and the Demographic Revolution
  • Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s
  • Callum G. Brown
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 April 2013
    Print publication:
    15 November 2012
  • In the 1960s, two great social and cultural changes of the western world began. The first was the rapid decline of Christian religious practice and identity and the rise of the people of 'no religion'. The second was the transformation in women's lives that spawned a demographic revolution in sex, family and work. Both phenomena were sudden though not uniform in their impact. The argument of this book is that the two were intimately connected, triggered by an historic confluence of factors in the 1960s. Canada, Ireland, UK and USA represent different stages of secularisation for the book's study. The religious collapse in mainland Britain and most of Canada was sharp and spectacular but contrasted with the more resilient religious cultures of the United States, the Canadian Maritimes, Ireland and Northern Ireland. Using statistical evidence from government censuses, the book demonstrates how secularisation was deeply linked to demographic change. Starting with the distinctive features of the 1960s, the book quantifies secularisation's scale, timing and character in each nation. Then, the intense links of women's sexual revolution to religious decline are explored. From there, women's changing patterns of marriage, coupling and birthing are correlated with diminishing religiosity. The final exploration is into the secularising consequences of economic change, higher education and women's expanding work roles. This book transforms the way in which secularisation is imagined. Religion matters more than mere belief, practice and the churches; it shapes how populations construct their sexual practices, families and life-course. In nations where religion has been dissolving since 1960 into apathy and atheism, the process has been part of a demographic revolution built on new moral codes. Connecting religious history with the history of population, this volume unveils how the historian and sociologist need to engage with the demographic enormity of the decline of Christendom. CALLUM G. BROWN is Professor of Religious and Cultural History at the University of Dundee.

The Culture of Controversy
  • Religious Arguments in Scotland, 1660-1714
  • Alasdair Raffe
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    16 August 2012
  • The Culture of Controversy' investigates arguments about religion in Scotland from the Restoration to the death of Queen Anne and outlines a new model for thinking about collective disagreement in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century societies. Rejecting teleological concepts of the 'public sphere', the book instead analyses religious debates in terms of a distinctively early modern 'culture of controversy'. This culture was less rational and less urbanised than the public sphere. Traditional means of communication such as preaching and manuscript circulation were more important than newspapers and coffeehouses. As well as verbal forms of discourse, controversial culture was characterised by actions, rituals and gestures. People from all social ranks and all regions of Scotland were involved in religious arguments, but popular participation remained of questionable legitimacy. Through its detailed and innovative examination of the arguments raging between and within Scotland's main religious groups, the presbyterians and episcopalians, over such issues as Church government, state oaths and nonconformity, 'The Culture of Controversy' reveals hitherto unexamined debates about religious enthusiasm, worship and clerical hypocrisy. It also illustrates the changing nature of the fault line between the presbyterians and episcopalians and contextualises the emerging issues of religious toleration and articulate irreligion. Illuminating the development and character of Scottish Protestantism, 'The Culture of Controversy' proposes new ways of understanding religion and politics in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Scotland and will be particularly valuable to all those with an interest in early modern British history. Alasdair Raffe is Lecturer in History at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Revelation Restored
  • The Apocalypse in Later Seventeenth-Century England
  • Warren Johnston
  • Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    18 August 2011
  • Revelation Restored is a study of apocalyptic thought in the later seventeenth century in England. It explores an under-examined aspect of early modern British history: despite the prominence of millenarian beliefs in historians' explanations of the early modern English church and state up to 1660, little has been said about these convictions in the years following the Restoration. The examination of applications of prophetic language and interpretation to explain the events in England from 1660 to 1700 illustrates their continued capacity to comprehend ecclesiastical and political developments. The book demonstrates that, far from having disappeared from the intellectual landscape, apocalyptic ideas still held the potential to animate opinions in the mainstream of political debate in the later seventeenth century. These responses were outlets both for demonstrations of dissent and for endorsements of authorised powers in response to crises in authority and efforts at religious settlement. In addition, this book contends that any strict periodization that segregates the concerns of early seventeenth-century England from those of the later seventeenth century has been too sharply drawn. Analysis of the nature of apocalyptic and millennial beliefs reveals that the concerns prominent in England in the early seventeenth century had not abated after 1660. WARREN JOHNSTON is an Assistant Professor at Algoma University in Ontario, Canada.

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